Mattia Preti. The Banquet Scenes. Sources and Strategies

Mattia Preti (1613-1699) produced in the third quarter of the seventeenth century not less than 17 "banquet scenes", large gallery pictures representing a narrative derived from literary including biblical sources and involving a banquet or "feast". Extant iconographies include the Wedding at Cana, the Feast at the House of the Pharisee, the Feast at the Epulone, the Feast of Herod, the Banquet of Absalom, the Banquet of Belshazzar, Cleito and Progne. Filip Moerman traces the pictorial sources and precedents of this imagery and analyses how Preti's formative years in Rome and early work in Naples equip him to create the banquet scenes as a new paradigm. The banquet scenes themselves are then examined iconographically and stylistically to probe Preti's artistic vision and strategy as well as these pictures' resonance and critical success with patrons, collectors and viewers during the Early Modern period and into our own era. With his banquet scenes, Preti immerses beholders in universal queries of good and evil, hubris, bone-shattering fright but also revelation and redemption.